Solana NYC

The following is a note from our founder, @vibhu. Dear @solanaspaces community, We’ve made the difficult decision to sunset our stores in NYC and Miami by the end of February, and to pivot our Solana onboarding efforts into digital products like DRiP, our free NFT product with more than 100k sign-ups. Solana Spaces was a startup that I founded just over a year ago. Our startup costs were funded by @SolanaFndn, but we are deeply thankful to @Phantom, @orca_so, and many other ecosystem teams for sponsoring Solana Spaces over the last year. Thank you, thank you, thank you to the team for coming on this journey with me. I say this without hesitation: The Solana Spaces team was the greatest startup retail team ever assembled, and we executed at the highest of levels. Designing a Web3 onboarding experience from scratch, in multiple cities, with our own merch, and 30 collaborations, almost 50 events, @spaces_dao, our own software, DRiP, and of course the myriad experiments we ran – all in about 8 months. We hosted almost 75,000 people in our stores and helped thousands walk away with Phantom wallets and Solana merch. Our endowed mission from day one was to experiment with new and disruptive models to bring people to Web3, and to serve the community on behalf of the Solana Foundation. As I told people often, as awesome as the stores were, if we found a more efficient way to bring people into Solana, we would throw our efforts at that. And as it were, I found that in DRiP. While our stores onboard between 500 and 1000 people per week, DRiP onboards that same quantity EVERY DAY. Over the last 2 months, it became increasingly clear to me that we were at an inflection point with our stores and our digital products, and a few weeks ago we made the call to focus our ongoing efforts on DRiP. More to come on the plan for DRiP soon, including rebranding this Twitter account. With this decision, we are saying goodbye to our US-based stores. However, the dream continues in two ways. First, with @spaces_dao. We plan to continue supporting the mission for Solana IRL all over the world by open-sourcing both the software that powers Spaces and the brand, and we hope to see people picking up where we left off. Second, we are in the process of identifying a place for people to pick up Solana merch and participate in other IRL activities in NYC and Miami. This week is your last week to come by our stores, take one last picture, and pick up your Solana merch. I’ve instructed our retail team to be ultra generous. So come by and grab some free high-quality Solana gear, while supplies last and with some limitations. Do us a favor when you do – share a picture and what you got on Twitter so we can all together enjoy the final week of Solana Spaces. With love and gratitude, Vibhu

oh shit, I’m moving out of NYC 😅✌🏽

If you're a Solana dev in NYC please reply with gm in this thread.

REGISTER!!! Summer of SOL registration is now live. This will be the first in-person @solana SF event. Sponsors are @ReciprocalVC, @_blockdaemon, @graphprotocol, @AlamedaResearch, & @FTX_Official. eventbrite.com/e/summer-of-s…